Arrhythmia
by sketchnurse
Summary: Sacrifice was useless, not when it could be so readily given to strangers. Not when it could be so readily taken away from friends because faith, too, was too precious for well-known risks." House/Wilson.


**I really like House/Wilson, so I thought I'd give some angst/hurt/comfort a shot. Huddy is just getting so tiring. Either hook them up or don't, at this point, I really could care less. House/Wilson, friendship or otherwise, has to be my favourite relationship on the show. Let me know what you think!**

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_A lapse in judgment is made, the parachute disregarded because the sky is too grey and uniform for movement to be sensed, his limbs too numb from shock to perceive acceleration._

_The cord pulled too late, the ground met with appalling speed._

_Bones broken, bad decisions made on the part of the rescuer, injuries underestimated and still untreated, stubborn casualty refusing to believe in more pain than he can see with his senses…_

You woke up from the dream in a cold sweat, and looked at the alarm clock, still old and analog and waiting for replacement.

You wouldn't let it go, though.

Too much had changed, and if you had learned anything, it was the humans were too suspicious to accept anything fundamentally out of the ordinary.

Sacrifice was useless, not when it could be so readily given to strangers.

Not when it could be so readily taken away from friends because faith, too, was too precious for well-known risks.

The anger rippled through you like an electric shock, then faltered.

Your emotions were on high these days, intensified by the effort of keeping them from everyone.

The small admission to Wilson that no, you weren't okay, had felt like a burst of fresh air in a room full of burning incense.

But the cloying, oh-so-enticing scent had returned, and you found yourself returning to the ritual of denials and deflections, subtle shakes of that full head of hair, disapproval emanating from his chocolate browns, originating in the interpretation of what seemed to be old, familiar patterns.

They weren't, though; what used to be the weaving of scotch browns and ghostly, clinical whites, melancholy piano keys and whispered lyrics, emesis basins and IV lines, is now the messily sewn collage of locked, padded rooms and anti-psychotics, Adirondack sunset gold and jaundice yellow, infant cries and smashing test tubes of margarita.

Uncaring, a shield to hide your humanity behind, had been forcefully taken away as the façade was lifted.

You used to be able to control the things that you felt, but now, sadness, remorse, regret, nostalgia, rotated routinely through you without stopping through the guard towers, though luckily, they remained within the realm of your head, never making more than a fleeting appearance on your face.

It was hard, to keep up the pretense of normalcy, a misshapen, haphazard structure that had somehow managed to become a pillar of strength for everyone who encountered it.

They depended on you to remain yourself through everything, ready with an insensitive remark and a sardonic smile.

But you were cracking.

Small fissures in your made-to-specifications armour, everything greying as your hair did, slowly aging and becoming weak.

Soon, they would forget about you.

You would be left alone once more, solitude a welcome companion, long forgotten memories of stone beaches and crooked sticks in the piles of ash left by bonfires rising to the surface as everything crumbled around your perfectly constructed reality.

The House-quake would start at your self-faith.

Shockwaves would move from the epicenter to everything else that had been keeping your delicately balanced mess of a grass-bound bamboo raft afloat in the sea you had envisioned the world to be: your need, in short, to live, to defeat the cowardice that willed you to return to the bottle, both of them, to retain what you felt defined your existence, to not fall down to the bottom again.

You had seen what could happen when everything was pushed to the side and left to fester for weeks, firsthand; you had been there, didn't want to go back again.

You were hyperaware of the fragility of your situation, your perceptiveness picking up on the subtle facial cues in the people around him; your intuition telling you that to live like change had happened so _solidly_ reversion was impossible was not only to live a lie, but something you would never have allowed yourself to think before.

It was as if there were a fuzzy, _amber_-coloured piece of glass covering the memories of what had been before, before things had become so complicated and twisted and frail and filled with sorrow, of a time when you had three people on your team, a best friend sleeping on your couch, a vixen of a boss flirting shamelessly with you, past history accepted as the taboo in your relationship, everything else acceptable.

Now, your mind was filled with labyrinths of flu medication and adoption attempts denied at the last minute, euthanasia, murder and softness, always the softness, of what had been fabricated, of what could never be, of what, you weren't sure of anymore, because hope had been so ruthlessly squashed that you didn't want to let it in again, pitiful and bloodied and full of too many cons, a burden.

You had never played by the rules; if you did, maybe you wouldn't have gotten your heart broken.

Then again, if Gregory House had played by the rules, he would likely be under the ground somewhere, killed by an enemy gun in battle, an army salute ready coffin side at his funeral, his father standing stiffly in uniform, an old housewife sobbing nearby.

You hadn't wanted that kind of life.

And _this_ was the one you had gotten.

Nighttime was the worst, because you had been on your feet all day, all three of them, wood and bone and muscle and sinew and scar holding the weight of nonchalance.

But nighttime was when you could finally let the pain show on your face, because no one would see it.

Nighttime was when you crashed, nighttime was when you laid awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, longing for some sort of depressant overdose to bring you to unconsciousness, so you wouldn't have to deal with the overwhelming and cliché sense of angst and hopelessness.

Wilson slept peacefully in the room down the hall, breathing in and out steadily, falling asleep at twelve-thirty every night like clockwork, whispered words to Amber finally ceased.

You could still hear him, sometimes, if you really listened.

Other times you focused on the hum of the new, larger refrigerator, holding Tupperware containers of leftover roast chicken and potatoes, blue cheese crusted medallions of tenderloin, perhaps penne in alfredo sauce.

You would eat some for lunch tomorrow, and go about your day as if you were still the same person you had been when you had first arrived in the hospital, swaggering in on reckless confidence and pain medications, lewd comments flying and agony just barely kept below unbearable.

You weren't, though.

The lack of faith hurt you, almost as much as your leg did, if you could admit psychological pain to be real and damaging.

It was as if your firm belief in the impossibility of change had been hammered so well into everyone's head that even real, shining evidence couldn't prove your earlier self wrong.

Though you knew that your true nature _still_ remained.

So, perhaps, it wasn't that people changed, but rather that they adapted, your attempts as social niceties as much a desperate attempt at survival as the squirrel's furious scramble up the building where the tree had been before, chased by a new kind of animal.

The people around you were the Catholics; you, the reformed priest.

They believed so firmly in your teachings, because Gregory House, the charismatic leader, had thrust them into their lives so far that extraction was not only painful and damaging, but sacrilegious.

There was no reason to believe you, because there had never been a reason in the past.

The extent of their trust in you never reached farther than your professional, medical opinion.

For a while, they couldn't have even trusted that.

You had looked forward to getting out of psychiatric care so intensely that your mind had focused not on improvement but escape.

When your sad epiphany had appeared in the form of a fallen self-proclaimed superhero, the possibility of happiness had been so looked forward to that the fall from the high of expectation had accelerated too quickly.

You couldn't have stopped it.

Though you had never set store in such things before, you understand the dream, and the cold sweat that you still lay in.

You travel down the hall to the bathroom, an unfamiliar enough journey without the cloying feeling of emotion threatening to collapse you in the hallway.

You wash your body in the shower, feeling a sudden need to become clean, free of the evidence of such a frightening subconscious message, soured and raw and plain, uncomplicated.

The water was near scalding, and you can feel your skin burning, the winter having made it dry and cracked, water stinging the loss of barrier between hard outer shell and the softness bordering the vulnerability beneath.

But you turn the water still hotter, needing pain more than relief, needing to feel something more than emptiness and cold, wanting the permafrost that had settled in your right leg to melt a little bit, wanting to experience steam and angry red and tears.

And you cry out, as your thigh cramps and spasms.

_Breakthrough_ pain.

The water continues to fall in a harsh, steady stream, running down your fissured skin and down the drain, swirls of blood and salty fluid following the almost steam down in a fierce whirlpool as a knife slid back and forth through your handicap, the gash in your knee unnoticed as the torture induced by past injury continued to burn your veins and rip your screaming mind open.

You are dragged from the porcelain vessel by silken arms, wetness blossoming on rich green fabric as your limp form slid out of your confines, but the pain continues, even through whispered comforts and pittances.

His voice is barely heard, but the fact that it is there makes its way through the wall of suffering to the small part of awareness that you still held, and arms attached to your body find their way around him.

Your naked figure clings to his clothed one for support, as you feel a syringe in your back and light blossom back into your reality.

"Wilson…." your voice chokes, and soft hands stroke through the short hairs covering your head.

"It's okay," he says, and you are sure, through the haze that was non-pain rather than blinding agony, that he is crying. "I'm here." and he sounds like Stacy had, the first night after going home, painkillers taking the edge off, nothing more.

"I know." you say, and you are sure your eyes are red as the skin you had tried to scald, your body limp and wrinkled and unwhole.

Your hands reach for his face, and you see what had once been too painful to look at, the sight of his features soaked in unadulterated concern for you, not soaked with guilt or resentment but with what you were pretty sure resembled love.

It had broken out of him, in the moment that it had taken to hear your strangled scream of pain, and it was free now.

You wonder how you had lived; not knowing that such comforts had been available to you.

"I had a vial waiting, just in case." he says, running nimble fingers down your damp back, soothing you, anchoring you to sanity. "In case… this happened."

"What, you holding me naked in your bathroom?" you ask hazily, still floating through the viscosity of morphine.

"Breakthrough pain." he answers, ignoring your question. "I wanted to be prepared."

"Boy scouts are always prepared." you mumble. "Boy Wonder Oncologist, always prepared…"

"Are you still in pain?" he asks, scanning your face for signs of discomfort.

"It's better. Much better. Thank… you." you say, still holding him in your pianist's fingers.

But he shakes his head.

"What're, what're we going to do?"

He looks worried, and rightfully so.

This was a slip-up, an indulgence you had been trying to spare yourself.

"Wilson… don't worry." you say, not sure how to make him feel better, not really knowing how to make anyone feel better.

You're not sure how you're going to proceed, now that you've felt the sweet embrace of opiates, but you'll make sure that it's not without him.

He looks at you still, though, concerned as he had ever been.

Brown meets blue.

Skin meets skin.

And you kiss.


End file.
